A biography for Leighton Vander Eschhasn’t been written yet.
“I just want everybody to have that one goal, that, 'Hey, we're going to make a Super Bowl run, and we're going to have some fun doing it, and we're going to do everything we possibly can to lay it on the line.' I know I have.”
“It's never ideal to get hurt.”
“Going in for a tackle, you've got to be able to defeat a block. You have to be able to have the correct leverage and you can't lose that leverage.”
“Obviously, I called the plays on offense, being the quarterback in high school and then going to college and then listening to the terminology and everything - the terminology was completely different.”
“I never came off the field in high school. You had to be in shape. You had to be able to play when you are tired.”
“You've gotta have a special talent to play eight-man football. You've gotta be a well-rounded player. I mean, you're playing both sides of the ball.”
“Anytime you're learning a new defense, there's going to be so much of a - everybody uses different words as far as terminology.”
“If you can get your good habits and just the way you play football down to a tee by practicing every single day the way you're going to play, by running to every single ball and just pushing yourself, it's going to turn into good things on the field.”
“I just have high expectations for myself anyway. I don't have anything less than that.”
“I need to breathe when I'm playing.”
“I want to know all the possibilities that can come up before the ball is even snapped on the field.”
“I cherished every moment of my NFL career, and it has been such a blessing to play the game for as long as I have played.”
“You can't stress yourself out if things are too hard or not.”
“To be an elite defense, you gotta keep growing every single day.”
“I think we just need to be accountable for our mistakes and keep being accountable.”
“Knowing everybody's job, I take pride in knowing that so I can know if we got to get something right on the field at the last second or somebody is lined up wrong or whatever in front of us.”
“It's the game of football, and the ones that can be resilient and they can bounce back from that and just keep continuing to grind, day after day no matter what happens, good things are going to happen eventually.”
“What bugs me most about it is when people that are on the outside, fans or whatever it may be, they want to say, 'Oh, someone deserves this' or 'someone deserves that.' They don't realize that this is literally like our livelihoods. We literally could get up and traded the next morning or the next day.”
“I'm going to keep fighting every single week to put myself in position to be successful.”
“I've always been motivated.”